Also, hope that you are white.

I'm black and never had an issue with hailing a cab for the right years I lived there

I'm going to wager that wearing a suit and/or other indicators of being of a higher social class are far more important than race. I've never seen a rich minority person discriminated against...

Do you believe that the fact that you, personally, have never "seen a rich minority person discriminated against" effectively support your argument? Do you think there are any studies that have been done to try and see if there is racial discrimination in the taxi business? If you haven't tried to look for such studies, why not? Or if you did, why don't you cite them instead of your own personal experience in not seeing rich minorities being discriminated against?

Maybe because you're not a rich minority? Plenty of them have filed complaints: http://people.com/celebrity/al-roker-files-complaint-after-n... http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/nyregion/danny-glover-says...

If I wear shorts, flip-flops and a t-shirt I get passed by all the time by cabs. If I wear a suit, almost never. Also, both those articles suggest something more to the story than outright racism. Most cabbies aren't comfortable with me riding in the front seat, and I wouldn't really blame them either.

Factually untrue. There are studies proving otherwise.

And I've never seen a black hole. Therefore, they don't exist.

A rich enough person has a car, sometimes even a private driver.

It's not like people sign a contract agreeing to never use taxis when they buy a car.

You could call for a cab, which worked fine. The app-based experience is undoubtedly better though.

I disagree. When I was in college (09-12 in Baltimore) it was impossible to get a cab unless it was a weekend night (in which case they’d all line up outside the dorms). I remember calling cab companies, being told “we put out a call on the radio, someone will probably be there in the next half hour.” And then nobody showing up. The ability to rate drivers and the ability of the system to punish drivers who won’t pick up mildly inconvenient fares has vastly improved this industry (at least from my POV).

You must not live in SF. In SF you would call a cab, and then hope that the cab would come. After 30 mins you would call again asking where the cab was, and they would send another cab. After another 30 mins you gave up and drove.

Same goes for trying to hail a cab from the streets. Empty cabs would drive past you because they wanted to only drive passengers to the airport. I'm glad they are all going out of business.

In theory you could call for a cab. In practice, you couldn't.

Do taxi companies in the US really not have apps or, you know, phones?

They do now in San Francisco. But only because they lost so much business to Uber. This was an industry that was effectively a monopoly -- not one company, but one type of provider. And none of the players was improving the experience for the customer.

Calling for a cab was extremely unreliable here. You could easily wait for an hour (because any driver coming to pick you up could, without ill effect for him/herself, stop to pick somebody up on the street). Some cabs took credit cards, some didn't. Some claimed to take credit cards but then "the machine was broken" so you had to pay cash.

Uber improved on every single aspect of the customer experience. And they did it while offering lower prices for the consumer.

However: to me, they haven't proven it's a viable, long term model. I highly doubt that they are paying their drivers enough to cover the cost of wear and tear on the cars (many/most of the drivers I see with Uber and Lyft are doing it full time, so they are crazy if they aren't factoring in the cost of the car and maintenance as part of their cost). And AFAIK neither company has proven they can make money.

So: this industry was due for a shakeup.

But it needs to be done by a company without rampant management problems, and it still needs to prove that there is a viable, long term business model that works for the company, the drivers and the consumers.

[edit: and, yes -- long term, there won't be drivers in these cars. But Uber has to find a way to survive until then, and I don't believe they can burn cash that long]

> Some cabs took credit cards, some didn't. Some claimed to take credit cards but then "the machine was broken" so you had to pay cash.

This type of thing sounds like the usual American "let the market sort it out" that other western countries don't have. Taxis are already government controlled (via taxi licensing) so why aren't they required to accept credit cards, as they are in Australia?

America has that regulation; that doesn't and didn't stop cabbies from taking advantage of those who lack the gumption or encyclopedic knowledge of regs to challenge the driver on the spot.

Paris also probably has laws against longhauling, doesn't mean Parisian cabbies don't do it to naive tourists.

Edit: And yes, some people (including me) do take the position that the market should be left to decide which payment mechanisms to accept (just like most people do in every other context -- who wants a law saying bakers have to accept credit cards?), so long as they're declared before the transaction, and there's (legally) free entry/exit into the profession. It's a strawman to characterize someone as being okay with changing the accepted payment methods after the fact.

Bakers and taxis are inherently different - no one gets stuck in a location they don't want to be because of a lack of wholewheat.

I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact: I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.

Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.

>Bakers and taxis are inherently different - no one gets stuck in a location they don't want to be because of a lack of wholewheat.

And no one gets stuck in an unfamiliar area while low on blood sugar?

>I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact

Yes, you were! You brought it up specifically in the context of cabbies who refused CC after taking on a fare with signs and machine saying they could pay that way. If your point was just that "being able to pay with CC is nice so it should be mandated", then you shouldn't have pointed to the after-the-fact case as a danger.

>I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.

And you're failing to ground it in any way that doesn't generalize to forcing arbitrary merchants to accept arbitrary payments, while focusing the majority of your rhetoric on grandstanding about "hey, I just think governments should help the people" instead of a concrete justification for how this helps the people, or any recognition of any downside of such a mandate (which you were able to see in the case of bakers and CCs).

>Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.

Again, you're assuming your policy helps the poor and anyone who opposes it just doesn't understand it, instead of actually elaborating on the substantive mechanisms. Tomorrow you'll be right back lecturing us that credit card acceptance hurts the poor because merchants have to distribute the fees over all customers, including the poor unbanked who can't get one, and I'm just too privileged to see that.

How about confining your remarks to the pros and cons of various policies without dragging motives and demagoguery into it?

Even if you find yourself in a tedious back-and-forth (which we don't need on HN to begin with), we can't respond like this.

Was in England last week. Many cabs still don't take CC. I used one cab, for the experience and then went back to Uber. Cabs just aren't that great, and the experience is not reliable, predictable, or easy.

Indeed. Often the CC machines in black cabs are "broken", forcing you to pay in cash.

> This type of thing sounds like the usual American "let the market sort it out" that other western countries don't have.

Well, to be fair, it's "let the market sort it out while severely restricting the market through regulation" which while I wouldn't say is the usual, isn't as uncommon as it should be. Either one has it's place, but together they generally don't work well...

Because any taxi could have told you before "if you dont like it, go to the competition"

At least in Chicago, they are required to accept credit cards. If they can't accept a card, you don't have to pay.

> I highly doubt that they are paying their drivers enough to cover the cost of wear and tear on the cars

Since Uber/Lyft has no problem attracting drivers at the rates they pay, this argument rests on drivers being financially ignorant enough that they don't notice they're losing money doing it.

Maybe they are not losing money, but perhaps many might be surprised how much less they are really making after factoring in cost and upkeep of a vehicle.

until Uber and Lyft rose in popularity, taxi companies were resistant to apps

In the Chicago suburbs, calling the dispatch center was and still is how it's done. There are a few "posts" scattered here and there where cabs will queue up, but in general, you have to contact dispatch.

Though they also have apps now.

They didn't before faced with an existential crisis.

In Canada, none had an apps until Uber arrived.

In NYC, there is one app called Arro that responded to the competition of Uber/Lyft, but was not available beforehand. I believe there is a 2nd app now as well.

In Pittsburgh they upgraded the taxi system with new vehicles and app/gps integration right around the time Uber showed up to pilot driverless cars.

This mechanism actually works pretty well in Chicago.

It didn't work when I wanted to take a cab from Logan Square to work. Called the dispatcher. The cab showed up somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes later.

"Pretty well". We just tried to get an Uber in the French Quarter and had to cancel 2 different drivers because they couldn't figure out how to route around the barricades.

In a couple urban cores where both customers and providers were extremely dense so that that simple method could work, surez that a mechanism in play; everywhere else (and often also available on those same areas) it was “customer calls dispatch agency on the phone, dispatch agency routes to service provider via radio (or mobile phone)”; Uber replaces the dispatch agency and changes the communication mechanism on both sides from a phone to an app on the phone.

And the third step after dispatch, cab finds another rider on the way and dispatch doesn't call back to tell you your cab isn't coming.